Reasons I Love Living in the Dominican Republic

1. Picking fruit off of the trees in my and my neighbors’ yards and eating them right then….or making juice with them later.
2. Mandar-ing (mandar means to send and to command, both of which are applicable in this case) kids to buy things from the colmado or run errands or clean my house for me. The kids here love doing things for me. The younger boys will go to the colmado to buy food for me. Or if I happen to walk up there myself, they will carry my bag back to the house for me. And the older girls often offer to sweep and mop the floors of my house.
3. Getting offered coffee every single time I visit someone’s house. I also love making coffee for people whenever they come over to visit me in my house.
4. “A buen tiempo.” Anytime I walk into someone’s house or walk past someone and they are eating, they are obligated to say “A buen tiempo,” which is a way of asking if I want any of their food. If I’m hungry, they’ll give me a huge plate to eat at that very second. If not, I simply say “buen provecho” and leave them to enjoy their meal. And this goes both ways. If I’m cooking lunch and someone enters my house, it is mandatory that I invite them to stay and eat the meal with me.
5. It is totally acceptable (and recommended) to sit outside in cheap, plastic chairs and do absolutely nothing except people-watch and gossip.
6. Being called “Profe” by every little kid in Baoba. Because I teach my English class in the school, all of the elementary school kids assume I’m a teacher and call me “Profe” (short for profesora) whenever they see me around Baoba. And every time I go to the school, I cause a huge interruption in every single class because as I am walking up the driveway, they see me through their classroom windows and start yelling “Lauren! Profe! Lauren! Profe!” and then some really rebellious ones run out of their classroom at that very moment to give me a hug.
7. Running to the beach in the mornings. Preferably alone with my ipod, but I also enjoy the mornings when the group of about 5 pre-teens accompany me.
8. Playing dominoes. Every afternoon there is a group of about 3-5 old men and women over the age of 80 who play dominoes. Every afternoon, including Saturdays and Sundays, from 1 to about 6 p.m., they are playing. So whenever I don’t have to teach English or my sex-ed class, I head over to play with them, which ends up being about 4 days a week. I love playing with them because ironically, they are such a rowdy crowd. If there is electricity, they will be nodding their heads to the beat of the rap music in the background. They always are drinking coffee, and sometimes the men add a couple of splashes of rum to their mugs. And they are feisty! They do not hesitate to tell me (either by yelling “TU JUGASTE MALA!” (translation: YOU PLAYED BADLY!) or by rolling their eyes and slamming their dominoes down on the table) whenever I play bad or make a wrong move. And I just burst out laughing at how ridiculously serious they take the game, which makes them even madder.
9. Everyone (all 1,500 of the citizens of Baoba) knows who I am, my name (or some version of it-Loren, Lawrence, Laurens) and where I currently live. Every day when I’m walking through town, someone random yells out “Hola Lauren!” and I will have absolutely no clue who that person is. And the fact that they all know where I live is especially beneficial when visitors come because they just say “I want to go to the Americana’s house,” and they will be shown to the right house in a matter of seconds.
10. Dominicans love to dance. There is not a second in the day when music is not playing in the background. And it is socially acceptable to sing and dance alone in the middle of the street to whatever music is playing at the moment, or if by some rare occurrence there is no music, it is acceptable to sing and dance to absolutely no music at all.

Escojo Mi Vida

I just started a course for the youth here on sexual health and how to make healthy and non-rash decisions. It's so necessary to have this type of information available to the youth here because they get married and pregnant so young, and HIV/AIDS is so prevalent. The course is called ESCOJO MI VIDA (translation: I choose my life). We meet every Wednesday night, and the course consists of 15 lessons based on themes such as values, self-esteem, the male and females reproductive organs, HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, abstinence, and birth control. Once the course ends, we’re going to have a graduation for the kids and they will become multipliers of the information that they just learned. Then they will go to the schools and churches in Baoba and surrounding communities to give lectures and dramas to other kids. It’s an amazing program here in the Dominican Republic that gives the youth here an opportunity to become leaders in the community.

The program also gives the youth a great opportunity to travel and see new places in the country and meet other kids their age because there almost every Peace Corps volunteer has a similar youth group. There are sub-regional, regional, and national conferences, and I am actually here in Santo Domingo on “official business.” The regional conference is April 3-5, and I can go with only 2 kids in my youth group. So I lied to them: I told the youth group the Peace Corps is going to choose who gets to go based on their answers to 2 essay questions. The questions were “what does Escojo Mi Vida mean for you?” and “Why do you want to go to the conference?” They all gave me their answers before I left for Santo Domingo on Saturday, and so I’m going to read through them and choose. I had to make everything sound official because I don’t want the kids to think I am choosing favorites or to ask me why I picked one person instead of another. So this way I can pretend to be neutral in this whole decision process.

So far I am absolutely loving this course, and the kids are too. It really gives me the chance to do a lot of fun activities with the youth that I feel normally they wouldn’t have the opportunity to do. On Sunday, March 8, we went to visit another volunteer’s Escojo group to celebrate International Women’s Day. We crammed 20 people into a pick up truck, and had a great time learning about famous Dominican women and parading through the other volunteer’s site. All of my girls spent the entire morning before we left doing their hair, putting on makeup and dressing in their finest attire. The guys too were decked out in their blingin’ gangster chains and sunglasses. So I think everyone really enjoyed their day out of Boaba.

Love and Marriage

So Liz wrote me a while back ago about a mutual friend who ran off to Las Vegas and married this girl that he had literally just started dating two months before, and when I heard the news I wasn’t shocked at all. So I started wondering, why is this not huge news to me? And then I realized: this happens all of the time here. I believe I mentioned a little bit about boyfriends and girlfriends running away and getting married in an earlier blog entry, but here in Baoba, it’s happened again and it’s the talk of the town. So using this latest couple (we’ll call them Carlos and Ana), let me explain how so many marriages occur here:

Carlos is 27-years-old and doesn’t have any kids, which is an oddity in this country (because he’s male and above the age of 16). But with all of the pressure from this society to have kids, his biological clock is ticking and he really wants to settle down and start a family. He has been dating a 19-year-old for the past two years, and he proposed marriage six months ago, but she refused, saying she needed to continue studying in the university before she settles down and has kids (you go girl!).

Carlos and Ana, who is 22-years-old, have been friends since childhood, and even dated a little bit when they were younger. Because they have always been friends and continue to hang out, everyone in Baoba is gossiping that they are having a secret love affair. But the two deny any relationship and maintain that they are only friends.

Carlos ended his relationship with his girlfriend in December for multiple reasons. One reason was that they weren’t compatible since he wanted marriage and kids and she didn’t at the time. And another reason was that he had begun to like another girl in Baoba. Since things have ended with the girlfriend, Carlos spends all of his time with his new girl. The people of Baoba notice a change in Carlos- that he’s not spending any time with other women, including Ana, and things seem slow and normal for about a month.

In the first week of February, scandal breaks out. Ana is pregnant. With the child of Carlos. So everyone (including Carlos’s ex-girlfriend) knows that he cheated on her with Ana. To further complicate matters, Ana’s parents had no idea that this was even a possibility. So Carlos does what all respectable men in this situation do (and believe me, this is a common situation). He stops talking to the girl that he has been enamored with during the past month, and during the middle of the night, he takes Ana to live with him…in the bedroom that is attached to the garage of his mom’s house. So now the two are officially “married.” And now Ana, who was studying in the university has to stop her studying, live with her mother-in-law (good luck, Ana), and turn into a doña by spending her day, cooking, cleaning and waiting for her man to come home from work. And to make matters even more complicated, Carlos has now told various people in Baoba that he doesn’t love Ana, he only “married” her because society demands it.

It has taken me six months to realize that when people speak of their spouse or of getting married, they simply mean that they live together and have children. And when I ask people why they don’t get married “with papers,” they say because then it is too difficult to have a divorce and split up. I also asked them why the couple must marry even if they’re going to have a baby. If Ana and Carlos don’t love each other, why can’t they have a child together, but still have separate love lives? Why can’t she continue living with her parents? But apparently that is more disgraceful than moving in together because it shows that the man is denying that the child is his.

To further complicate matters (and because their definition of marriage is so lax), many of the men here “marry” one woman and have children, and then “marry” another woman a couple of years later, and then sometimes return to “remarry” the first, original woman. So basically, it’s cheating on your live-in girlfriend. And what surprises me the most is that many times these women are friends. They accept the fact that they both have children by the same man, and arrange play dates for the kids, and sometimes even go shopping together.

UPDATE: Ana had a miscarriage. Miscarriages are very common in this culture due to the young age that the girls have when they get pregnant. Even though Carlos and Ana married solely because of the child, they must now stay together for at least a month, because it would look bad on both of their parts if they split up so soon after they lost the baby. But the people here in Baoba seem to think that as soon as a respectable time period passes, the two will split up, and go back to their normal lives, pretending like this whole "marriage" didn't happen.